


The Lesser Sacrifice

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Poisoning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 10:48:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11965845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: For the following Tumblr prompt:Jack & Daniel & Peggy. All three get poisoned. There's enough antidote to heal one properly, or keep two alive but in pain. There's certainly not enough antidote for three however you stretch it.





	The Lesser Sacrifice

**Author's Note:**

> This is also for the hurt/comfort square on my trope bingo card. Takes place a few years post-canon, in the early days of SHIELD.

"The way I see it," Daniel said, looking up from the open case in his hands, "there's no way this amount of the drug can stretch between three people. It's not possible. At best, we can maybe do two of us, as a stopgap measure until someone can go for help."

Peggy looked up from struggling with Jack's bonds. The Leviathan goons had tied him tighter than the other two -- clouted him in the head a couple of times too. Presumably they thought he was more of a threat. Which showed what they knew, since Peggy had gotten free almost immediately. Naturally she'd untied Daniel first, leaving him to investigate while she tried to get Jack loose.

"And what, leave the third of us to die?" Peggy asked tartly. "That's not an option."

Daniel shook his head. He reached up to swipe sweat-soaked hair off his forehead and sank down on an empty crate. None of them were in good shape, but Jack thought it might be hitting Daniel harder than either him or Peggy -- maybe some lingering after-effect from his Midnight Oil exposure two years ago, or maybe they'd accidentally dosed him more heavily than the other two. It wasn't like anyone was paying close attention to careful dosing when injecting their prisoners with an experimental, lethal drug, after all.

"Look, if we're gonna talk strategy, there's only one that makes sense," Daniel said. "One of us takes the full dose of the antidote. That ought to leave them in decent enough shape to hotfoot it down this damned mountain and get help. And it's pretty obvious I'm not the person you want for that."

He looked at Jack, and while Jack knew he and Sousa didn't see eye to eye on a whole lot of things, on this, they were in agreement. They both looked at Peggy.

"You are being absurd," Peggy snapped. The rope around Jack's wrists finally parted, and she sat back on her heels as Jack leaned forward and started working on his ankles, trying not to notice the way the walls of the old HYDRA base wobbled around him.

What they'd stumbled into was a former HYDRA weapons research facility in the mountains of upstate New York ... and an entire group of Leviathan operatives who were after the same facility for rather different reasons. 

Things hadn't gone well.

And things had gotten worse when Dottie had strolled into the room in which they were tied up, smiled directly at Peggy, and placed a small case on one of the empty crates in the room. "Three of you," she'd said. "One dose of antidote. Who will it be, Peggy?" She winked, her glance dropping to Peggy's bound hands, which Peggy had instantly stopped working back and forth as soon as Dottie walked in -- but Jack, even blinking blood out of his eyes, was pretty sure the hell-cat knew that Peggy was within inches of getting free.

"Do we really think they're gone?" Jack asked, rubbing his ankles to restore circulation to his feet. "Our little friend Miss Underwood in particular?"

"I do," Peggy said. "They have an entire case of this stuff, enough to buy Dottie back into the good graces of the Soviets. She won't be wasting time. At most, they may have posted a guard, but everyone _except_ Dottie thinks we're dead, or will be soon. And she, it appears, has decided to play a game."

"Have both of you forgotten that the longer we talk about this, the sicker we're all getting?" Daniel said, his voice ragged. "Look, Peggy, take the dose --"

"I will do nothing of the sort. We can split it three ways --"

"There isn't enough," Jack broke in. "Peggy, he's right. I don't like it either, but if you take the full dose and head down to that town we passed through on our way up here --"

"And come back to find the both of you dead? I don't think so!" She seized the case from Daniel and thrust it into Jack's hands. "If you think it's such a sensible plan, then take the dose and do it yourself!"

Jack stared at her -- at both of them. And then down at the open case in his hands, the single syringe glistening in its crude foam padding.

It ... made sense, didn't it? He was in good shape; he'd done well in track at Cornell. If only one of them could have it ...

\-- it sure as hell wasn't going to be him. Of the three people in this room, he was the _last_ person who deserved to get this. He closed his ears to the voice of temptation (which sounded a little like Vernon) and snapped the case shut with shaking hands.

"Draw straws?" he suggested.

"I have a different idea," Peggy said.

Jack looked up to find Peggy standing over him. She extended a hand and, after a moment, he took it and let her help him up off the floor. He offered her the case; she shook her head, and the thought occurred to Jack that she might be struggling with her own version of the Vernon voice in his head.

"So you said you have an idea," he prompted.

Peggy's smile was wan -- she was very pale -- but oddly infectious all the same. "I suggest we all start walking. Running, if we can manage it."

"I'll slow you down," Daniel protested.

"Oh, shut up," Jack told him, hauling him up by a grip on his jacket.

 

***

 

"So let me get this straight. They had a dose of the antidote and they didn't use it?"

"Good thing, too," Stark remarked without looking up from his equipment. "Couldn't have reverse-engineered and replicated the thing in time without having so much to work from."

Phillips gave up. Apparently nobody was getting a straight answer out of anybody until those three up there were recovered enough to be properly debriefed -- though he'd distinctly seen Stark's manservant coming and going a few times already.

"Any idea when they'll be up for visitors?" 

Stark waved a hand. "Don't ask me, I'm just the science guy."

"Medical staff says they need to be left alone, but I swear I saw your butler in there this morning."

Stark shrugged and swapped another slide under his microscope.

 

***

 

The medical wing of the fledgling SHIELD agency, like the rest of it, was still under construction: walls draped with sheeting, exposed drywall everywhere.

"You realize we were incredibly lucky," Jack said, sitting tentatively on the edge of his bed. Getting up hadn't worked out so well the first time.

Daniel was still flat on his back in bed, not even trying to move, though he did roll his head far enough to look in Jack's direction. "What was I supposed to do, wrestle her to the floor and stab her in the backside with the syringe?"

"You could've found a way! Or done it to yourself, for that matter -- I mean, you move slow, but you would've gotten there eventually --"

"Says the man who had a perfectly good opportunity to inject himself and didn't take it."

"I see things are proceeding as per normal," said Peggy's dry voice from the doorway, and she came in, moving slowly and stiffly, as if her bones were filled with ground glass. Like the rest of them, she was wearing nothing but a crisp white hospital gown. Jack hastily flung a corner of the sheet over his legs.

"Don't you have your own room?" he wanted to know.

Peggy sank into a chair beside Daniel's bed. "The temperature in my room is quite unreliable. Such are the perils of being confined within a building that is still under construction. I'm chilled to the bone. Hand me that blanket, please, Jack," she added, pointing to a folded blanket beside his bed before stroking a quick hand across Daniel's face, brushing back his tousled hair.

Jack sighed and did it, because he felt too lousy to argue with both of them at once. Anyway, trying to evict Peggy from the male side of the medical wing, given their present conditions, would probably just result in a slow-motion struggle that would land both of them on the floor and give Sousa fodder for making fun of him for the next year.

"Are you getting up or going to bed, Jack?" Peggy asked, taking the blanket from him and giving a light press of her cool fingers to his hand as she did so.

"Haven't decided yet."

"I vote back to bed," said Daniel, the traitor, "since the last time he tried to get up, he fell on his face."

At least he hadn't mentioned Jack throwing up on the nurse who was helping him back to bed ... yet. Jack gave him a pleading look. Daniel gave the bed a meaningful stare. Jack gave up and slumped back onto his pillows.

"Peggy's up," Jack couldn't help pointing out.

"Peggy doesn't also have a concussion on top of everything else."

Peggy fussed with arranging the blanket over herself. She was appallingly pale and definitely looked like she'd be better off in bed, but good luck getting her there. Or keeping her there. "You two are giving me a headache," she remarked.

"You could leave," Jack said hopefully.

Instead she leaned her head against the back of the chair, closed her eyes and, from the look of things, fell asleep immediately, with one of her hands resting on Daniel's arm.

For two people who'd been nearly at death's doorstep the day before, they both looked ... well, not okay, but reasonably all right. Like they were going to be all right, anyway.

Jack wasn't likely to forget the sheer panic on Peggy's face when Daniel had just collapsed, crumpling like a rag doll on the steep mountain road. Jack had had the case out before he'd even had a chance to think about it, but Peggy had closed her cold, shaking hands over his.

"Jack, he wouldn't want us to."

"You really give a damn what he wants, at a time like this?" Jack had rasped back at her.

She'd hesitated, doubt creeping into her pale face -- and that was when a car carrying two junior SHIELD agents had come skidding and jolting around the corner on the rough road, because the team had missed their check-in and _for once_ it appeared all of Peggy's training efforts had paid off.

Jack wondered, now, if all the decisions they'd struggled with (who gets the antidote, who lives, who dies) had really made any difference in the end. They were going to be rescued anyway. Oh, sure, Stark said that having a sample of the antidote had been a big help in synthesizing his own version, but they'd have accomplished just as much if they had done nothing except sit tied up and wait for their rescuers to show up.

But you _couldn't_. You couldn't just sit around waiting to be rescued; you _had_ to fight. You had to make the choice that felt right at the time, even if it wasn't the right choice in the end. God knows he'd made enough wrong choices to know. But in the long run -- and it had taken him far too long to figure this out -- the decisions he really regretted weren't the ones where he did what felt right and then dealt with the consequences; it was the ones where he knew the right thing to do and did the wrong thing instead.

And this wasn't one of those times.

"I can hear you thinking from over here," Daniel said quietly. "It's keeping me awake."

"I'm _thinking_ too loudly for your delicate sensibilities now? Really?"

The look Daniel gave him was disturbingly fond. "Just ... go to sleep, Jack."

It wasn't bad advice. 

Anyway, all he was really doing was distracting himself from the deeply odd feeling of having people in his life for whom he would, very willingly, pass up a dose of a lifesaving drug if they couldn't have one too.


End file.
